It is common for skeptics to question whether we can actually achieve the Millennium Development Goals set by the world back in 2001. In the midst of the current economic downturn, many are even more concerned about the efforts leaders would put in to further the progress that has already been made.
So, we were refreshed in a recent post we saw, ‘Freeing the entire human race from want’, by David Steven from Global Dashboard. Steven effectively challenges the skeptics and points out that the outlook is not as grim as people have imagined – genuine progress has been made, even in the face of global recession:
‘The Great Recession largely spared the developing world (so far at least) and, far from slowing down, the decline in poverty accelerated. According to the GMR, the headline target – halving the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015 – is not just going to be met, it’s going to be smashed.
In 1990, 41.7% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.25 a day. That’s dropped to 25.2% in 2005, less than five percentage points above the 2015 target of 20.9%. By 2015, the IMF and World Bank project it will be down to 14.4% – a reduction of nearly a third.’
But what about the clichéd argument that once we take China and India out of the equation, progress towards poverty eradication is negligible?
‘At this point, it’s more or less obligatory to point out that this is all down to China (with a small contribution from India), and that ‘real’ poverty – in Africa – hasn’t been touched. Except that’s not the whole story.
China has seen an astonishingly rapid progress – poverty was down almost fourfold by 2004, and is projected to be cut 12.5 times by 2015. India is also seeing accelerating improvements and is projected to have reduced poverty by more than half by the target date.
But Africa isn’t expected to do as badly as many people think. Its poverty rate was 57.6% in 1990, had fallen to 50.9% in 2005, and is projected to be 35.8% in 2015. That’s still ten percentage points above the target, but if attained, it would be far from an abject failure (180m fewer Africans in poverty in 2015 than would have been the case with no reduction in the proportion of the poor).’
Of course there will be challenges and much depends on policy decisions made by developing countries, but encouraging success stories suggest that rapid progress is possible.
‘much will depend on the nature and quality of growth that is generated, and whether we will continue to see the worrying divorce of income growth from human development (health, education, gender, etc.).
The GMR has an interesting box on poverty in Brazil, which was one of the most unequal countries in the world in 1990, but has seen both growth and a sharp decline in inequality since 2003:
The 1990s marked the expansion of social safety nets in Brazil. Public social expenditure, including conditional cash transfers such as the Bolsa Família, targeted to poor families rose from 17.6 percent of GDP in 1990 to 26.0 percent of GDP in 2008—an increase of almost 50 percent in education, health, housing, and social security. Recent evidence suggests that this increase in social spending and better targeting contributed much to reducing poverty and inequality.
The Bank and IMF believe that these policies took an additional 17.5 million people out of poverty, bringing the absolute poverty rate down by 9 percentage points more than if inequality had stayed high.’
He goes on to argue that there is no reason why progress wouldn’t continue in the future. Not only should we continue to strive to achieve the MDGs, further commitments also need to be made.
‘In 1990, there were 1.8 billion poor people (in a world of 5.3bn people). If the IMF/Bank projections pan out, by 2015, there’ll be 882.7m poor people left (in a world of 7.3bn). That represents real progress in both relative and absolute terms.
Here’s a thought. In the debate about what should succeed the MDGs, one obvious option is simply to extend the current set of goals and focus harder on the challenges facing the 15% of the world’s population that will still be below the poverty line in 2015.
If poverty does indeed fall by a billion between 1990 and 2015, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t fall as fast over the next fifteen years, even as the global population grows by another billion. In other words, having halved absolute poverty, leaders could commit to abolishing it by 2030.’
In his conclusion, Steven argues that the world’s leaders should live up to what they have promised in the Millennium Declaration:
‘In the Millennium Declaration, the world’s leaders described the world’s central challenge as ensuring “globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people” and promised to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.”
They were committed, they said, to “freeing the entire human race from want.”
With poverty in retreat, I think we should be doubling down on that commitment, and moving from halving poverty by 2015, to ending it by 2030. It’s a stretching target, especially if contagion from the economic crisis finally hits developing countries, and especially as the last of the poor will find it hardest to escape from poverty.
But it also seems to be a target that could be achieved.’
With news on the cuts of foreign aid and the cancelling of the Global Fund’s Round 11 of grant-making, this is an important reminder to all of us of the incredible progress that has been made and that the achievement of the MDGs is very much possible.
|
